Is the user "TreeBuilding Project" taking the tree forward or wasting time?
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The issue is that this thread is seen by the Vanilla software (e.g. in my bookmarks) as last updated on 26th June (though by the accurate latest poster). I have seen this behaviour on other threads too, long and short. I have reported this multiple times without resolution.
P.S. according to Google AI (couldn't find better evidence), 'Vanilla Forum software does not have a native "freeze last updated date" feature', which makes me doubt this is intentional.
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Another couple of tagging changes by TBP
Jane Collier•GS3H-TLS
William Miller•LTJZ-K53
William Miller is a strange one. His appearance on the 1891 census has been tagged as a source for his death!
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Am I correct that messaging the user Tree Building Project after an incorrect or insufficient change via the usual Chats function does not or is unlikely to get a reply?
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@FrankLittle It's almost guaranteed that you would get no response. 😪
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That is rather unfortunate (from the perspective of my motivation, and data quality control).
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@FrankLittle the TreeBuilding Project user is purely used by a team of BYU students to run automated, high-volume scripts without (in my opinion) appropriate control or oversight, and not in compliance with FS's standards re how their APIs should be used. You might do better contacting the BYU RLL team via email (rll@byu.edu).
Various Community members have tried very hard indeed over a long period of time to get this stopped, or at least much better controlled and communicated, but have so far completely failed. Support have tried to escalate the matter for us, but they appear to have no real access to any team within FS' labyrinthine structure that has any power over BYU RLL.
At the moment I am working on collecting a set of incontrovertible evidence of these activities so we can try an abuse report (these do seem to have been working better recently, but I don't hold out much hope for this particular one).
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Thank you @MandyShaw1 I wish you every success. Running scripts against a production database is a tricky process, and when it relies on crowdsourcing for quality checking it's likely to cause problems. I once worked as a volunteer on the OpenStreetMap project in its early days. As some public data became freely available there were inevitably people who wanted to improve and speed-up filling in the map by running scripts to add in public data. This led to mis-categorized elements added to maps (because of mismatches and misunderstandings about, in this case, the terminology. So whole water areas were filled in with non-existent 'buildings' (the data was just the river area of a harbour under municipality control) and school gyms became 'commercial' buildings. The rules were clear: only add bulk data if you remain in contact with the local members on the forum, but the script runners didn't listen or respond, so in the end they were left to it. There's a limit to how much 'repair' work one is willing to do.
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I should add that my main issue with all this is the lack of a feedback mechanism to the active users who do the detailed research which enables accurate ascription of persons and data to the correct individual. And I haven't seen clear explanations of what is done and why by way of explanatory notes either..
I can see how running well-supervised scripts could be useful if there was a way to contact people if the automation goes wrong or is otherwise leading to unwelcome results.
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There is a discussion that was started today that indicates something that user "TreeBuilding Project" was doing in July 2025. It involved creating relationships between existing children and parents. In this case, the father had been married twice and there were children from both marriages; each child had been correctly related to his or her parents. Along came "TreeBuilding Project" and blithely added relationships to the other mother. In some cases, the added relationships could have been described as "Step" (but weren't) if that's their thing, but that would hardly be appropriate for the children of the second marriage. The children of the second marriage had parent/child relationships added with the first wife who had died years before the children were born.
I haven't reread the 11 pages of the present post today, so I don't know if this behaviour has been recorded here before.
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@JulianBrown38 I will look into this.
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Well, I apologise for the unconscionably long time this has taken, but here is my draft abuse report:
I hope it covers all the key points on the 'automation' side (note that it doesn't discuss treehelpers, the Power Linker, etc.)
I would be really grateful for any proof-reading anyone has time to do, or indeed any recipients anyone can suggest beyond the Report Abuse team.
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P.S. after some thought I think I will post this report first in the DQS group since it looks like that may now be a channel to getting DQ tickets raised within FS; it may also flag the whole BYU RLL thing to anyone in the FS DQ community that is blissfully unaware of it. (I'll tweak that version so it is presented specifically as a DQ incident report.) If that goes nowhere I will return to Plan A.
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I scrolled through 10 of the 11 pages. I am unable to view page 1.
To summarize the list of problematic usernames (please correct or add if incomplete):- The currently active username "TreeBuilding Project", and the inactive usernames "CommunityCensus Project" and "USCensusProject" are all computer programs by misguided Brigham Young University Record Linking Lab (BYU RLL). As such, sending them chat messages is a waste of time.
- Any username that starts with "treehelper_" are humans, specifically student volunteers at BYU. I have sent chat messages to at least one of them and received no reply, i.e. also a waste of time.
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@Nyx773 Correct all all counts. In addition:
There are a few other more minor 'automation usernames', such as CommunityCensus Project1.
It is clear that students or others do make some manual changes when signed in as 'automation usernames', which further muddies the waters.
I'm going to submit my report this morning (link to pdf is in my June 30 comment here), once I have tweaked it to reflect this:
Hopefully the report will reach someone who gets the problem (in particular the lack of care and oversight, which is in my view the bit that is both unforgivable and readily remediable going forward) and who has the power to get things changed. We will see…
Link to p.1 (which I couldn't navigate to in the normal way either): https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/164127/is-the-user-treebuilding-project-taking-the-tree-forward-or-wasting-time/p1
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Done, it's here
Sorry, thought I had posted this earlier.
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